ABSTRACT
Drama critic and Shakespearian connoisseur James Boaden is now a nearly forgotten literary figure, almost exclusively remembered as the author of five once famous theatrical biographies. 3 As well as for his work as biographer, Boaden is also known for his dramatic translations, the most noteworthy of which is possibly The Voice of Nature, A Play in Three Acts (Haymarket, 1803), the translation of Louis Charles Caigniez’s melodrama Le Jugement de Salomon (Ambigu-Comique, 1802). Among the small number of plays Boaden worked at as either an adaptor or author The Secret Tribunal (Covent Garden, 1795), a rather free dramatization of Benedikte Naubert’s romance, Herrmann von Unna (1794), possibly remains the most interesting due to the influence it bore on both Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk. 4 More relevantly for my present purpose, during the 1790s Boaden composed and staged three adaptations of the most successful Gothic novels of the period. Initially, 152Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Italian were brought on stage respectively as Fontainville Forest (Covent Garden, 21 March 1794) and The Italian Monk (Haymarket, 17 August 1797). Later Boaden’s interest in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s sensational novel – already implied by the hotchpotch title The Italian Monk, which intentionally sought its literary pedigree in both Radcliffe’s and Lewis’s works – was further exploited in Aurelio and Miranda (Drury Lane, 29 December 1798). This drama was initially presented to John Larpent with the simple – yet unequivocal – title, The Monk. The original title, though, is erased in the Larpent copy. 5 As implied by this attempt at preventive self-censorship, Aurelio and Miranda (this was the title Boaden eventually settled for) rather injudiciously aimed to sanitize its controversial and morally ‘impure’ 6 source text, in keeping with other contemporary sentimental revisionings of Lewis's texts. As I shall explain later, Boaden made recourse to insertions and deletions (most notably, the demonic influences conceived by Lewis), but the final result was far from satisfying either as an original composition or a dramatization. 7
